agrochem oligarchs:california groundwater,land barons,resnick, John Vidovich

agrochem oligarchs:california groundwater,land barons,resnick, John Vidovich

http://www.sfweekly.com/dining/one-central-valley-farmer-uses-two-thirds-as-much-water-as-l-a/

Last year’s rainy winter was an aberration, and the long-term expectation for California is that the agriculture-heavy state of nearly 40 million people will only get drier. So it’s a bit shocking to read in this illustrated California Sunday photo-essay by Mark Arax that a single Central Valley farmer uses about two-thirds as much water in a year as the entire city of Los Angeles, home to more than 1 in 10 Californians.

Stewart Resnick, 81, doesn’t entirely know how much land he owns, but his estimate of 180,000 acres — of which 121,000 are irrigated — translates into 281 square miles. By area, that’s almost six San Franciscos and the equivalent of more than half of Marin County. To produce his almonds, pistachios, citrus, and other crops, Resnick uses more than 400,000 acre-feet of water, which represents more than two-thirds the annual consumption of the City of Angels (587,000 acre-feet).

As the owner of 15 million trees, Resnick is the largest single water user in the Western United States, and he’s both a titan of agribusiness and of marketing. He and his wife Lynda are responsible for the rebranding of mandarins as easy-to-peel Cuties and the association of pomegranates with antioxidant-fueled wellness through POM Wonderful, a claim theSupreme Court effectively nixed. 

Now, it’s not entirely fair to blame one person for agricultural water use. If a thousand people owned the same total number of acres under cultivation, the aggregate amount would likely be the same. But Resnick has some villainous traits, such as suing his neighbors for trespassing because their bees pollinated his mandarin trees, causing them to sprout seeds. (No mortal can control where bees fly, so Resnick installed giant nets to keep them off his lawn out of his orchards.)

Worse, because there is no functional aquifer under much of Resnick’s land, he’s resorted to grabbing it from elsewhere. California Sunday reports that there exists an “off-the-books pipeline that Stewart Resnick has built to keep his trees from dying. The water is being taken from unsuspecting farmers in an irrigation district in Tulare County more than 40 miles away.”

Meanwhile, he lives in a 25,000-square-foot mansion on Sunset Boulevard, more than 100 miles away. Arax’s superbly reported story is worth reading in full, as it’s bursting with jaw-dropping details such as how the Resnicks send POM to David Bowie, or that only nine men operating five machines can harvest $365 million worth of almonds in four weeks, and how the Resnicks at one time owned the Franklin Mint. As is always the case with these long-form jaw-droppers, you should read the whole thing ........................................

The Story of How Beverly Hills Billionaire Farmers Stewart and Lynda ...

exiledonline.com/how-limousine-liberals-oligarch-farmers-and-even-sean-hannity-are...

Nov 19, 2009 - (The president of Resnick's Paramount Farms, Joseph MacIlvane, rubs shoulders with the Vidovich family, sharing a post on the board of directors of the Dudley Ranch Water District, a private water district that owns 9.62% the Kern bank, along with John Vidovich.) Despite — or maybe because of — the ...

Water, Money, Taxes, Campaigns, and the Bond: The Resnick ...

www.restorethedelta.org/.../water-money-taxes-campaigns-bond-resnick-farming-stor...

Oct 19, 2014 - Resnick can pump water from the San Joaquin River, from groundwater, and from the Central Valley Project and State Water Project aqueducts. ... Berrenda Mesa and Dudley Ridge have already been involved in huge water sales, including the sale by Dudley Ridge landowner John Vidovich of paper ...

Building an agricultural empire in a land of drought | WWNO

wwno.org/post/building-agricultural-empire-land-drought

20 hours ago - Arax: So because there is no groundwater out in Lost Hills, they came up with this idea of pumping groundwater from 40, 50 miles away. This water basically came from a land owned by someone who's also a near billionaire — a guy named John Vidovich. And Vidovich ended up pumping water an ...

A Kingdom from Dust — The California Sunday Magazine

https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-dust

7 days ago - Stewart Resnick is the biggest farmer in the United States, a fact he has tried to keep hidden while he has shaped what we eat, transformed ..... But western Kern has no groundwater to draw from. ...... John Vidovich will tell you he's the interloper who came over the other mountain, the Coast Range.

How Limousine Liberals, Water Oligarchs and Even Sean Hannity Are ...

https://www.alternet.org/.../how_limousine_liberals%2C_water_oligarchs_and_even_s...

Nov 18, 2009 - (The president of Resnick's Paramount Farms, Joseph MacIlvane, rubs shoulders with the Vidovich family, sharing a post on the board of directors of the Dudley Ranch Water District, a private water district that owns 9.62% the Kern bank, along with John Vidovich.) Despite -- or maybe because of -- the ...

A Journey Through Oligarch Valley - NSFWCorp

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/oligarch-valley/

May 22, 2013 - John Vidovich, the current family patriarch, lives in a $11.4 million home in the Los Altos Hills, a ritzy wooded area overlooking the bay just south of San Francisco sitting ... Then there are Stewart and Lynda Resnick, Beverly Hills billionaire farmers who own up to 300 square miles of land in Oligarch Valley.

Missing: groundwater

Officials unhappy about water proposal | News | hanfordsentinel.com

hanfordsentinel.com/.../article_980e612a-023a-5ba5-b647-a872299e5917.html

Jan 30, 2017 - Meanwhile, according to public documents, Semitropic has developed an underground water bank that started in the 1990s and has the ability to store 1.65 million acre-feet of water. Compare ... John Vidovich, a landowner in Semitropic who could benefit from Semitropic's proposal, defended it. Vidovich ...